Psycho-Analysis and Social Psychology

William McDougall

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317527916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

From the Preface: 'In these few lectures delivered in the University of London (May 1935) I have returned to the always interesting, but generally quite futile, task of criticizing the teachings of Professor Sigmund Freud and his school. On the present occasion my criticisms are made with ruthless frankness, in accordance with the policy I have recently adopted. I have realized too late that I might have done more for my chosen science, had I from the first spoken with a less modest voice.'

Originally published in 1936, two years before the author's death, this title is a critique of the teachings of Freud and his school from a social psychology standpoint. It has several appendices which include the examining of 'Totem and Taboo' and the Oedipus complex.

APPENDIX I

AN EXAMINATION OF FREUD’S TOTEM AND TABOO: RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN THE PSYCHIC LIVES OF SAVAGES AND NEUROTICS¹

PROFESSOR FREUD has turned his astonishingly fertile and ingenious mind to a new problem. Dr. Rivers has pointed out some years ago points of affinity between dreams and the myths of primitive peoples. Now Professor Freud comes forward with a far more ambitious scheme of application of his peculiar psychological principles. Briefly and baldly the aim of the book is to show that all totemism and taboo and, in consequence, ‘the beginnings of religion, ethics, society and art meet in the Oedipus complex’ (p. 260); that is to say, that all these things are rooted in the male infant’s incestuous desire for his mother. The affirmation of the universality of such incestuous desire has become the foundation-stone of all Freudian psychology. Freud writes: ‘We have gone so far as to declare that the relation to the parents instigated by incestuous longings is the central complex of the neurosis’ (p. 29); and ‘In every individual of the race the desire for it (i.e., incestuous union with the parent of the opposite sex) is unconscious, just as in the neurotic’ (p. 53).

This is not the place for an examination of this fundamental dogma. We must rather accept it for the purpose of the argument, and must try to see how far its acceptance enables Freud to throw new light on the problems of totem and taboo. For, if it should appear that he succeeds in this self-chosen task, the fact will lend support to this most disputable doctrine of the universal Oedipus complex.

The conclusions at which Freud arrives may be stated concisely and, I think, fairly, as follows. Totemism is the fundamental form of taboo from which all others are derived. The totem animal is essentially a substitute for the father. The prohibition of all intercourse with women of the totem clan is an extension of the prohibition against incest with the mother and is the root of all exogamy. ‘The divinity that doth hedge a king’, the taboo of kings and chiefs, is due to the king’s occupying the place of the father, to his exercising paternal authority and omnipotence, and the consequent transference to him of the man’s normal attitude of jealous hatred towards his father. The taboo of the dead is a further and less direct extension of the same attitude; and all other forms of taboo are extensions of this attitude towards the dead, in so far as spirits or demons, analogous to the spirits of the dead, are conceived by the savage as surrounding and influencing him at all times and places. Gods were developed from totem animals by a further extension of the same attitude, as the notion of spiritual powers developed. ‘The totem may have been the first form of the father substitute and the god a later one in which the father regained his human form’ (p. 245). Thus the observance of taboo is the beginning of ‘conscience’ and morality; the rites of the dead are the beginnings of religion; and the exogamic relations of the totem clan are the beginnings of society.

Such in briefest outline are Freud’s conclusions. The argument by which he seeks to establish them is twofold. The one part consists in showing the resemblances between the attitude of the savage to his totem and other taboo objects and that of the neurotic, and in a less degree of the normal man, towards his father. The other part consists in showing how, these attitudes being postulated, savage societies may be supposed to have developed their particular forms of taboo and ritual. Let us consider first the former part.

The attitude of every man towards his father is ‘ambivalent’. He hates him and desires to murder him, because his father enjoys sexual intercourse with his mother, on whom his own sexual libido is fixed. All this sexual jealousy is normally driven into ‘the Unconscious’ by the social prohibitions and the tenderness for the fatherly protector which naturally arises in response to the father’s loving care. In the normal civilized man this repression is successful and continued; but in the neurotic and the savage (for all savages are more or less neurotic or at least in a condition very similar in many respects to neurosis) this repression is less complete, and the incompletely repressed hatred of the father works powerfully within him, alongside his desire for incest with his mother, determining many of his emotional attitudes and actions.

This ‘ambivalence’ of the emotional attitude towards the father is the key which Freud uses to unlock all doors in this obscure region. It is on showing a similar ‘ambivalence’ of attitude towards the totem, towards kings, towards the dead, and towards taboo objects in general that he chiefly relies for the justification of his scheme.

The second part of the argument consists in adopting Robertson Smith’s view of the totem feast and the attractive hypothesis of the nature of primeval society which Atkinson and Andrew Lang erected on the basis of a suggestion of Charles Darwin. The combination of these two hypotheses with the principle of the great strength in savages of the ‘ambivalent’ attitude to the father, based on the incestuous desire of the mother, yields the following sketch of primitive society. The father or patriarch expels from the family circle his adolescent sons, in order that they may not share his rights over the females of the group. When the band of exiled brothers feels itself strong enough, they return, kill the father and eat him; then, being filled with remorse for the treatment of their tenderly (consciously) loved father (treatment to which they have been impelled by their unconscious jealousy of him), instead of satisfying their incestuous desires, they set up a strong barrier against such indulgence, in the form of the exogamic law or taboo against intercourse with the mother; and, since the father was a polygamist, or rather indulged himself indiscriminately with all females of the group, this taboo against incest affects all women of the group (they being regarded collectively and individually as mothers of all sons of the group). The father whom they have slain and eaten then becomes the totem; and the women of his group belong to his totem; and the horror of incest with them remains strong, just because the desire for the mother extends itself to all these wives of the father; for they are collectively the mothers of the revolting brothers, and a mother is by definition a woman with whom they unconsciously desire sexual intercourse. In the totem feast the brothers (i.e., the men of the totem clan) repeat ceremonially the slaying and devouring of the beloved father, thus giving vent once more to their unconscious hatred and, at the same time, renewing their sense of remorse and guilt, which is the foundation of all conscience and religion.

The taboo of kings and gods at a later stage of social evolution is a natural extension to these wielders of paternal authority of the ambivalent attitude of tender affection and of guilty remorse. And to the dead in general the same attitude becomes extended, because all death is regarded by savages as due to murder; and the sense of guilt of the patricides is so strong and the ambivalence of their emotional life is so habitual, that they feel themselves to be the murderers of all their relatives who die; and the more they love them, the more strongly do they unconsciously hate them, and therefore the more distinctly do they feel the sense of guilt and the fear of their shades.

It is advisable to substantiate this condensed account by citing a few of the most relevant passages.

Psycho-analysis has revealed to us that the totem animal is really a substitute for the father, and this usually explains the contradiction that it is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that the killing of it results in a holiday and that the animal is killed and yet mourned¹ (p. 234).

The expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. … Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion (p. 236).

They hated the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert themselves. This took place in the form of remorse (p. 237).

This remorse forbade the killing of the totem except ceremonially.

They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason this had to correspond with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex (p. 238).

At first the brother clan had taken the place of the father horde and was guaranteed by the blood bond. Society is now based on complicity in the common crime, religion on the sense of guilt and the consequent remorse, while morality is based partly on the necessities of society and partly on the expiation which this sense of guilt demands.

This comprehensive scheme of explanation of all things in terms of ‘the Oedipus complex’ might be criticized by questioning the truth of its three basal hypotheses, namely, the universality of the Oedipus complex, Robertson Smith’s view of the totem feast, and the Lang-Atkinson view of the nature of the primitive human group and the ‘primal law’. It might also be criticized by pointing to things that it does not explain, totems which are not animals (such things as the sun, stars, rain, wind) and such taboos as those connected with agricultural operations or whatever other things and actions are of great economic importance to the savage. But Professor Freud’s ingenuity would no doubt be equal to the task of extending his system of explanation to such things, also to tracing all of them back to the Oedipus complex. It is more profitable therefore to waive such objections, to grant to Freud his three basal hypotheses, and to inquire whether, these being given, the scheme as applied entails any insuperable difficulties.

One serious difficulty is lightly touched on by Freud himself.

We know nothing about the origin of this ambivalence (the coincidence of love and hate towards the same object). It may be assumed to be a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life. But the other possibility seems to me also to be worthy of consideration: that ambivalence, originally foreign to our emotional life, was acquired by mankind from the father complex, where psycho-analytic investigation of the individual to-day still reveals the strongest expression of it (p. 261).

It can hardly have escaped anyone that we base everything upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass in which psychic processes occur as in the psychic life of the individual. Moreover, we let the sense of guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years, remaining effective in generations which could not have known anything of this deed. We follow an emotional process such as might have arisen among generations of sons that had been ill-treated by their fathers, to continue to new generations which had escaped such treatment by the removal of the father.

Freud here raises the question which is raised also in an acute form (but not, so far as I know, previously mentioned by him), by his doctrine of fixed universal symbols; the question namely of the validity of postulating well-formed racial innate ideas and racial sentiments or complexes. Jung has boldly recognized this problem and accepted such innate ideas, in his doctrine of universal ‘archetypes’ of thought; and it is interesting to see that Freud is becoming alive to the same implication of his doctrines.

In the present state of biological opinion, the necessity of assuming such innate factors of the mind is an objection to the whole Freudian system; but not a fatal one, for the possibility of the transmission of acquisitions by use-inheritance cannot be absolutely ruled out. But, if we grant such implanting in the racial mind of such ideas and tendencies by use-inheritance, we cannot allow Freud to play fast and loose with the principle, as he inclines to do. For he tells us that Westermarck is wrong in supposing the horror of incest to be innate—

the experiences of psycho-analysis make the assumption of such an innate aversion to incestuous relations altogether impossible. They have taught, on the contrary, that the first sexual impulses of the young are regularly of an incestuous nature (p. 206).

It would be difficult indeed to admit that each of us inherits both a tendency to incestuous love and a horror of it; and to admit this would be gravely disturbing to the whole Freudian system. We have, then, this curious situation. Freud asks us to admit that the remorse and sense of guilt experienced by the rebel sons of the primeval horde-father have been transmitted to their descendants and have been the basis of all subsequent religion; while, on the contrary, the horror of incest (which is assumed to have been evoked in each generation during and since those remote ages) has not become in any degree innate.

Another serious difficulty arises in connexion with those forms of taboo known as ‘avoidance customs’, avoidance of females of the same totem, mothers-in-law, and so on. Freud assumes that the avoidance custom is evidence of unconscious incestuous desire: for only if the desire (and also horror of it as incestuous) be present will the avoidance taboo be maintained.

If taboo expresses itself in prohibition it may well be considered self-evident … that it is based on a positive desireful impulse. For what nobody desires to do does not have to be forbidden (p. 117).

We have then to suppose that the incestuous desire for the mother is extended to all women who are ‘objects of avoidance’. It would seem that this incestuous desire is a so highly inflammable passion that the mere acquisition by any woman of a position in any way resembling that of the mother (e.g., that of mother-in-law, or that of membership in the mother’s totem group), suffices to direct it upon such a woman and thereby to necessitate the imposition of the taboo.

In these few critical remarks I have been willing to give Freud all the rope he asks for, and even more: but there are limits to our credulity beyond which even the glamour and prestige of the Freudian psychology cannot and should not carry us; and in this matter, I think, those limits have been passed.

I cannot conclude without citing one delicious example of the working of the Freudian imagination.

With the introduction of agriculture the importance of the son in the patriarchal family increased. He was emboldened to give new expression to his incestuous libido which found symbolic satisfaction in labouring over mother earth (p. 253).

So that agriculture also can be traced back to the Oedipus complex. It is true that many anthropologists have shown reason to think that women were the first cultivators of the soil. But that difficulty can be swept away by the aid of a little imagination: no doubt these first female wielders of the spade were accustomed to speak of ‘father earth’, and by so doing were enabled to secure the much-needed symbolic satisfaction of their incestuous libido. Further, is it not possible that men, when they speak of ‘mother earth’, are really disguising the fact that unconsciously they regard the earth as their father, and that, when they thrust their implements into it, they are repeating the primordial tragedy of the slaying of their much-loved and much-hated father? This suggestion may be recommended by the fact that its acceptance would at once explain the practice of earth-eating or geophagy which at one time may have been universal. It would also explain the universal tendency of boys to cover themselves with mud: for, if the earth is the father, it is obvious that mud is the blood of the father; and that by thus imbruing their hands with the blood of the father, they would find satisfaction for their unconscious hatred of him.

In short, is it not obvious that, if we allowed ourselves the laxity of reasoning which is habitual to Freud and many of his disciples, and if we possessed his fertile ingenuity, there would be literally no limits to the possibilities of application of his principles, and that every detail of the conduct of men in all the seven ages might be traced back to the same foul root, ‘the Oedipus complex’?

¹ Reprinted from Mind, 1920.

¹ Let not the innocent reader be misl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orginal Title Page
• Orginal Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter 1 An Estimate of Progress and Prospects1
• Chapter 2 Various Psycho-Analytic Excursions Into the Field of Social Psychology
• Chapter 3 Freud's Excursions Into Social Psychology and the Consequent Progress of the Psycho-Analytic Theory of Human Nature
• Appendix I An Examination of Freud's Totem and Taboo; Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics1
• Appendix II Professor Freud's Group Psychology and His Theory of Suggestion
• Appendix III A Great Advance of the Freudian Psychology1
• Appendix IV The Oedipus Complex
• Appendix V Some Social Effects of the Freudian Teachings
• Index